Cash one Hull of an incentive

HULL CITY’s players have been promised £70,000 a man if they keep the side in the Premier League.

CONVERSATION KILLER: Phil Brown’s half-time team-talk could be cited as the beginning of the end for

Chairman Paul Duffen estimates that relegation will cost his side about £30million in revenue – an astonishing figure given that it includes a series of huge parachute payments to soften the blow.

The club have used 31 players in their campaign so far, making the final bonus pot – written into the players’ contracts at the start of the season – just shy of £2.5m. Put into context, that is a cheque any Premier League chairman would be willing to pay for survival.

The calculators will be put to a different use on Sunday, working out the various permutations that “Survival Sunday” can throw up.

Hull can at least take solace from the fact that, like Sunderland, survival is in their own hands. Win and they stay up – simple as that. The downside is that the visitors to the KC Stadium are league champions Manchester United.

A point at Bolton last Saturday was enough to keep their noses above water for the time being at least, but the draw extended their run to just one win in 21 league games.

That poor form could lead to the most calamitous collapse in Premier League history if they were to go down from their position of sixth at Christmas.

In October they sat joint second after collecting 20 points from their opening nine games.

In 1994-95, Norwich fell through the relegation trapdoor from seventh position on Christmas Day while, since the Premier League shrank to 20 teams, Reading’s plummet from 12th at the same stage last season is as bad as it has been. All of which inevitably draws the attention back to Boxing Day and that half-time team-talk on the pitch at Manchester City, when Phil Brown’s team were already 4-0 down.

Publicly, the players have been reluctant to talk about the incident but, finally, experienced midfielder George Boateng has admitted that a few eyebrows have been raised.

“I am not going to lie,” said Boateng. “It was my first experience of having a meeting on the field at half-time and I have been in the Premier League for a decade. It only affected us for a couple of games but, because we didn’t get a much-needed win or point, losing started to become a habit.

“Slowly your confidence starts getting less and less and then it is very difficult to get a win.

“But I hope that, whatever happens on Sunday, people don’t use that as an excuse to criticise Phil Brown. We have had 20 games after that and surely as a team you would think it cannot affect you.”

All will be forgiven – if not necessarily forgotten – if Hull can get the result they need and that means effectively matching anything Newcastle can do at Villa Park. Perhaps Brown’s earpiece will be tuned to Radio 5 Live rather than his technical team in the stands for once.

Certainly, with Middlesbrough also hoping to come into the reckoning with an unlikely goal-difference swing, avoiding a drubbing may be all that is required by Hull on Sunday. So many permutations.

Fortunately, another of the Hull players, Kevin Kilbane, is a veteran of these nail-biting afternoons. He was part of the Wigan team who went into the final day of the season three points from safety, but managed to beat Sheffield United at Bramall Lane to send their opponents crashing down to the Championship instead.

Republic of Ireland international Kilbane believes that the key is to see Premier League status as something that needs to be won, rather than something that you fear will be lost.

“When you have the amount of points we had, you don’t feel like you’ll be dragged into it,” he said. “But the league is very unforgiving.

“You don’t want it to get to the position we’ve got into – and I honestly didn’t think it would happen – but now we are in that position you can’t look back over what has happened. You have to try to be focused on the job at hand.

“When you are in the Premier League playing against top-class teams, you can have a bad succession of games and I think everyone realises that.

“But we have managed to remain positive here. Training has been bright every day and the players have always been optimistic about staying in the top flight.”

WILLIAM HILL are betting on how the bottom three in the Premier League will end up and offer even money that West Brom will finish bottom, Middlesbrough 19th and Newcastle 18th, while offering 5-2 that West Brom will finish 20th, Boro 19th and then Hull in 18th.‘When you have the amount of points we had you don’t feel you’ll be dragged into it’